MS OS/2 1.3 in Virtual PC 2007

As I know, OS/2 1.3 is not a Beta operating system, some may be interested in this, as OS/2 1.x is reported unuseable under VirtualPC. What I did was to install the system on my PS/2 SX56, and made the VHD from the image of this drive. As you may already know, OS/2 was the joint project between IBM and Microsoft, for a better operating system, than DOS, means preempitive multitasking, multithreading, pipes, semafors and all that is needed for a modern operating system. Before Windows NT this was Microsoft's most advenced product, and was sold mainly for servers. You may even find some working copies of this even nowdays in ATMs and stuff. You can download my VHD from here: http://zdanee.uw.hu/os2/os2_13.zip

It is not a vanilla installation, it contains the OS/2 1.1 CD, and some applications from OS/2 1.1 and Windows 3.0 WLO.

I had a look at this. It is quite interesting. I have never seen 1.3 running.

This is info, things to look at.

The DOS icon points to the "dos box", or "dos coffin". 1.x runs only one DOS session, full screen, all the time. This is a kind of 3.3, which pretends to be 10.x0.

There's a copy of Windows 3.0 installed. It runs in real mode, but it does this in any version of OS/2. More interesting is to compare icons of progman.exe and the OS/2 shell pmexec.exe (Desktop Manager). Many other icons are similar too: One can even see that control panel is Win 2.x vintage.

Control-Esc takes you from the DOS to OS/2 desktop, where we see yet another feature that made it into vista! Notice how PMExec's groups are lists of items, rather than an icon-field. Windows program manager replicates this behaviour, and Explorer, even in vista lines them up.

The 3.0 win is not part of the system, I was only messing around. The WLO applications are a later addon as well. You also can find a few programs from OS/2 1.1 in that image, like a blockbuster game (c:/os211/bricks.exe), or an alarm clock (c:/os211/aclock.exe), the older, text-graphical version of system editor (.../e.exe), and stuff.

You know, when OS/2 had an error, it reported a SYS code. You said, you failed to run the VHD above.
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It would be easy to do the same with OS/2 1.1, but i miss a bootable floppy for it, so setup cannot start. I tried downgrading OS/2 1.3, but ofcourse i failed. Well, the files are all executeable, so probably one can try to replace PM of 1.3 with PM of 1.1, since it is the main difference (and HPFS and REXX and ATM...). As far as I know, Michal Necasek has a working version of even 1.0, he has a website and knows alot of OS/2.

I ran OS/2 from 2.1 onwards, and for some years, did not have a MSFT operating system on board (PC-DOS + OS/2).

OS/2 was the only system that could bypass the 504MB limit on my PC, so it was used extensively for burning CD-ROMS (using GEAR of all things). Most of the cd-layout went into high partitions (ie past 504MB), while DOS, OS/2 etc shared the 1008 MB below this.

Because 20 MB is not a lot of core, i had a special 9MB version of OS/2 3.0, set up with SYSINTX, to reduce load while the cdrom was prepared. It had some non-default shell, which kind of looks like a menu bar.

The normal OS/2 was usually the latest (2.1, 2.1w, 3.0, 3.1, 4.0). I still have OS/2 eComStation (vv 1.0/1/2).

Windows 95 came in 1998, and to this i hacked 95Plus to 95Minus (mostly by culling the install!)

There are full sets of floppies on the FTP servers here - just go on SillyProject or AbyssUnderground. I had the first floppy booting in VPC, but then it froze .

I could never be bothered with OS/2, really, but I've decided to learn how to use it now, because then I'll have experience of every major operating system that was in use during my lifetime (and before).

Well then the trick is easy, the floppy froze because the code is for i80286, and to switch between real and protected mode it uses some weird technics (making the CPU fault for 3 times then restart it in real), witch does not work in VPC. But if you install it on an actual system, something between a 386DX and a Pentium, the install can run, and detect the CPU as a 386, and after that all you need to do is to make a VHD from the actual HDD. For this i use savepart on the actual system (booting DOS from a floppy), and then restore the image in VPC on a VHD with the same size.